In the gaming industry there is a significant volume of gambling that occurs at live table games that use playing cards. Example live table games include Blackjack, poker, Baccarat, and others. There are also proprietary or specialty live card games that have developed, such as Pai Gow poker, LET-IT-RIDE, CARIBBEAN STUD, and others. These and many other games use playing cards.
The use of real playing cards has a number of associated limitations and disadvantages which are of general concern to most card games, while other problems are associated with the use of playing cards in particular games. Several card manipulation operations are time-consuming, such as collecting, shuffling and dealing the cards. In many card games there is also the step of cutting the deck after it has been shuffled.
In the gaming industry, moreover, there is a significant amount of effort devoted to security issues that relate to play of the casino games, especially those that use playing cards. Part of the security concerns stem from frequent attempts to cheat during play. Attempts to cheat are made by players, dealers, and by both dealers and players acting in collusion. This cheating seeks to affect the outcome of the game in a way that favors the dealer or players who are working together. The amount of cheating in card games is significant to the gaming industry and constitutes a major security problem which has large associated losses. Thus, costs to prevent cheating are significant. Many of the attempts to cheat in the play of live table card games involve some aspect of card manipulation by the dealer during collecting, shuffling, cutting, or dealing the cards. Introducing one or more extra cards into the deck or into the cards in play is a common manner of cheating.
One approach to reducing security problems associated with the use of playing cards utilizes card readers, such as card dispensing shoes that have card detection capability. Card shoes hold a stack of cards containing typically from one to ten or even twenty decks of the playing cards. The cards are held in the card shoe in preparation for dealing and to secure the deck within a device that restricts access and helps to prevent card manipulations. Card shoes can be fit with optical or magnetic sensors which detect the cards as they are being dealt. Some of the difficulties introduced in security analysis by using above-the-table cameras is reduced when the sequence of cards dealt can be directly determined at the card shoe using optical or magnetic sensors. One advantage of such card shoes is that the card sequence information can be collected in a machine-readable format by sensing the specific nature (suit and count) of each card as the card is dealt out of the card shoe.
Conventional card shoes that sense the character of each playing card can convert the card identities and the dealt sequences into digital information or machine readable code. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,582,301 to Hill (the “Hill reference”) describes a card dispensing shoe with barrier and scanner. In the card shoe described by Hill, an optical scanner, CPU system, and software associated with the shoe immediately know the card value, card rank, card suit, the sequence in which each of the cards was removed from the shoe; the hand or participant to which it was designated for delivery, as well as the scores of the various hands comprising the game round. Many other technologies exist or can be adapted for sensing specially made playing cards, or can be applied for optically scanning standard conventional playing cards as they are dealt or as each arrives “on deck” at the dealing position within the shoe. The scanned card information can be converted to digital or electronic information and fed to a memory or processor within a larger gaming system.
Because of the above-described vulnerability to cheating, there is a need for improved systems and methods that allow real playing cards to be used in some electronic gaming systems in order to provide the look, feel, and action of real cards while providing elements of security, automation, and virtual display of the cards. There is also a need for the real cards, having been converted to processor readable information during play, to be accompanied by corresponding wagering information, wherein the betting information is also virtually displayable. Thus, there is also a need for systems in which real cards are accompanied by real or virtual wagering chips or other betting techniques, and both cards and wagers are converted to digital information for processing, security tracking, and display of their images. There is a need for improved gaming systems that can sense both the cards and the bets in order to add a live feel to the game, add entertaining graphics, automate tedious parts of double-checking card and chip movement and whereabouts, and provide confidence and security to those at the gaming table that the cards and chips are being digitally tracked for all to see and verify.